My job for the final project was to design a website that our Linn anthology could live on. Many of my peers went out and did some excellent analysis of Linn’s writings. However, if we keep doing what we have done in the past with our studies on Linn, these works are going to be loosely connected with no real description of what they are or why our study of James Merrill Linn is important. I wanted to make sure that our work could be published in a way that makes it understandable by people outside of our classes.

Before I could do any coding, I needed to generate a diagram of what our site would look like, both at a high-level map view, and a specific page-by-page view. I did this the old-fashioned way, by creating some pencil-and-paper sketches of what elements I thought needed to be included in the site, and how different pages were going to connect to each other. At this stage, I decided that a navigation bar would be the best way to organize all of the sections of our site, providing easy-to-find links to both our editorial comments and content.

Using the online color palette generator at Paletton.com

As I was beginning development of the site, I discovered that color is a very important consideration when doing web design. In the computer science curriculum here at Bucknell, I’ve learned that identifying a bad interface is quite easy, but picking out what’s wrong with it is much more challenging. As someone without much artistic skill, I needed some help when it came to making the website visually pleasing. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools out on the web that provide a number of different services for web developers. The site I primarily used, palleton.com, helps designers generate aesthetic color schemes. I fiddled with the available settings for quite a while until I managed to find a palette that I thought fit our historical research quite well.

Using HTML’s ‘li’ elements and CSS’s built-in classes to create a working navigation bar with a dropdown menu

Another major part of my work was creating the navigation bar that would link all the parts of our site together. To do this, I followed a standard method of turning an HTML list of links into a functioning navigation bar using CSS. In order to create elements that respond to a user’s cursor, I had to use the CSS :hover selector to change the properties of elements whenever the cursor was hovering over it. The most challenging thing to implement was the dropdown menu when navigating to our editorial content. CSS can recognize some classes, such as “dropdown-content,” and automatically apply certain properties to elements of that class without the designer needing to explicitly code it in the stylesheet. Learning to use this built-in dropdown feature, and modify it to work the way I wanted it to, took quite some time. But, the end result greatly benefits the layout of the navigation bar.

Overall, I’m quite happy with what I’ve managed to accomplish in this final project. If I had a bit more time, my next step would probably be to spend time setting up a genuine image gallery, with the ability to scroll through images and open them up in an overlay screen. Using Javascript, I could also automatically populate this gallery with every image in a folder, without needing to explicitly code each one of them in the HTML file. After working on this project, I feel more comfortable with web design, and I look forward for the opportunity to do more work in this field in the future.

All of the transcription we have done in this unit has been very much a collaborative effort. From the very first transcription activity we did, there wouldn’t have been much progress made had we been working alone and isolated. More sets of eyes looking at a single line is one of the best ways to speed up the transcription process. A lot of words can be recognized with just a simple look-over, but some words are more challenging to interpret. The best method I’ve found for these words is to go through one character at a time and try to compare and transcribe each letter. Generally, these problematic words arise when the start or the end of a word are hard to read, so getting the other part and making an educated guess is also a valid strategy.

The document transcribed from and the end result text marked up in TEI

There were a number of advantages to working with the actual documents in the Bucknell Archives. The simple black and white scans we were using as the source of our transcriptions lost a lot of details that were in the original letters. For instance, one word that was giving me trouble in the scanned document was something that looked like it should have been ‘had,’ but had way too many lines to be those three letters. When I finally got to look at that part of the document in the archive, it became apparent that the word was indeed ‘had,’ but Linn had originally written ‘were’ there first, and changed the word to ‘had’ by writing over it. This intricacy was lost in the monochrome black scan we were originally working with. However, the processing that went into creating the digital scan did help to pull better information than the human eye could. It’s easy to see bleed-through on the physical document, which made some words harder to read. However, in the scan, this bleed-through was filtered out.

Here is the word in question, hard to decipher in the scan but easily understood when looking at the actual document.

A lot of what Linn writes about in the March 2nd letter and journal entry are the same, the visit from Morris, learning of the occupation of Nashville, Memphis, and Savannah, etc. He even describes these events in nearly the exact same words in both the letter and the journal. However, in his journal, he noted that the instructions from Morris were against army orders. This is not something he notified his brother of. He also spent more time in his journal complaining about the little irritations of everyday life (poor weather, broken kitchen equipment). In his letter home, he spent more time discussing the state of the war and world overall, talking about US relations with the Rebels, England, and Mexico.

Every time I work on TEI, I find something new to challenge me. I worked with TEI, and, specifically, James Merrill Linn two years ago during my first year at Bucknell. As a beginner in all aspects of the digital world, I was scared by the concept of TEI. What is it? What does it do? Honestly, until now I have realized the importance of transcription and text analysis. Over two hundred years ago, there was a man from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania writing from a ship in the Atlantic back to his hometown. James Merrill Linn fought for this country, so I feel a great need respect and honor him and his work through my dedication to this project. In order to do a successful job on an assignment like this, one needs to learn correct transcription skills and semantic markup.

Smudgy handwriting

There are multiple reasons that make Linn’s letters hard to read. The first is that these letters were written in the 1860s; the language and style of writing is not so prevalent today. The second is that after over 150 years, the ink and quality of the papers starts to deteriorate. While the Bucknell archives do a great job conserving these artifacts, it naturally happens. On my particular letter, on March 5, from Linn to his father, or Papa as he calls him, there was a large section that had smudged. It was on the bottom right corner of the letter, and it was illegible to read some of the handwriting. Another thing to note is that Linn tends to use patterns in his writing, i.e., the ampersand, but I could not justify what these words were.

Something else that was very useful to us was the use of the Bucknell archives. I was able to see much more clearly his handwriting when it was in front of my own eyes rather than a computer screen. I actually loved using the magnifying glass to see his handwriting. It is amazing how Linn actually had written and touched those letters during the civil war!

After the original transcription, we marked up the text using TEI. This gives the letter some semantic meaning. People, places, events, etc. are categorized according to the critical judgments of the specific TEI editor. For example, is a ship a placeName or a objectType? I will always argue that it is a place Name, because Linn writes from it. The letters will be cited from the Cossack, which is a ship that Linn occupied during the war. He resided in this ship; therefore, I think it is a p

Linn writing from Cossack

lace. Others may not feel the same way, and they may want to mark this as a objectType; this is why TEI can create some lively discussions. It is somewhat subjective. Also, when Linn writes to his family, he tends to write differently than if he is writing for himself or the Lewisburg chronicle. If he is writing to his father, he will talk about his well-being, while, if he is writing to his brother, he will talk about sending home guns. If Linn is writing for himself or the Lewisburg chronicle, he seems to write more formally about events; he knows there may be a bigger audience, which may be why his writings become more objective.

Once the TEI markup was completed, we transformed it into an HTML format to be able to publish it digitally. This is a part where I struggled, because I am not as familiar with HTML as I would have liked. It was confusing to me how this worked and why it had to be done the way it was. Ultimately, I am satisfied with the end results of Module 3, because I know, or hope, James Merrill Linn would be proud.